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Favourite Book

DanHigginbottom said:
I defy anyone to read 'Oh whistle and I'll come to you my lad' by MR James and then take a lonely walk on a beach at night. I tried that once...
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Absolutely the best. Ever read any of EF Benson's ghost stories - not quite up there with MR James but not far off. And the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (ed. Michael Cox and RA Gilbert) is a great collection.

One of the most frightening books I've read is actually a biography. Mikal Gilmore wrote Shot In The Heart about his Mormon family and his more (in)famous brother Gary Gilmore. To cut a long story short their father convinced the rest of the famiily that they were being pursued by a demon or malevolent spirit. There are some deeply disturbing moments in the book and one of the most frightening haunted houses I've ever come across in either fact or fiction.

But of course pretty much anything is Fortean if you look at it the right way....
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Couldn't agree more tmj. The New-Age, Fantasy and Science-Fiction sections of any bookshop can't even begin to hold a candle to the collected strangeness contained on the other shelves.
 
Favorite Books

SOLARIS by Stanishaw Lem......

Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!Go Read!
 
Fortean for different reasons, but there's the famous Bradbury (Ray, that is) story 'A sound of thunder'. Some research was commissioned a few years back to find out what people remembered from their childhood learning/reading and a staggeringly huge number worldwide remembered the details of this story without knowing the title or author.

For those of you who may be in the above category, it features a t-rex, a time machine, a presidential election and a butterfly. Ring any bells? Damn good story.

And if we are mentioning books that were filmed by Tarkovsky (Solaris), then how about Roadside Picnic? Can't remember the author though. Filmed as 'Stalker' - one of the best 'alien intelligence' novels ever.
 
Lol ... I was just thinking about the dinosaur/president/butterfly story the other day, and I knew it was Bradbury but not the title and indeed it is a hazy childhood memory!
I wonder if anyone could help me with another ... I seem to recall a book with black haired people who were real people and blond haired people who were really machines .... in a London under a bubble with a war supposedly going on outside and ..... stuff .... anyone know what book/story this is? the main characters, if I recall were named after real writers? historical figures? I seem to remember an Aldous Huxley .... and one kid breaks into an old library and finds all the books by the people they are named after and also a way out of the bubble?
HELP ME!!!!!

ahem:cross eye
 
Walter Tevis' 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' has to be the best fiction I've read and re-read (nothing like the crap film of course). Perhaps the best non-fiction I've read, apart from the standard indispensable reference texts, is "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind", Mark A. Noll's critique of the American Evangelical churches. It starts, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind". :)
 
one of the best ive read recently was hannible - not strictly fortean but well written never the less
casio
 
fortean books

iain banks is of course superb if just for his strange deaths of the characters, ia m thinking of the crow road and wasp factory,

why has nobody mentioned "messiah" by boris starling, a fantastic book much better than the tv thing, or "Them" by jon ronson(?)??
 
can any of you good people point me in the direction of books in a similar vein of ninteen eighty four, and the hitchikers guide to the galaxy please cheers muchly lil paul :)
 
lizard23 said:
I wonder if anyone could help me with another ... I seem to recall a book with black haired people who were real people and blond haired people who were really machines .... in a London under a bubble with a war supposedly going on outside and ..... stuff .... anyone know what book/story this is? the main characters, if I recall were named after real writers? historical figures? HELP ME!!!!!

ahem:cross eye
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It's called "The Overman Culture" but I can't remember who it's by, I'm afraid, and my copy of Clute and Nichols is far to far away for me to consult it for the answer this evening.
 
little paul said:
can any of you good people point me in the direction of books in a similar vein of ninteen eighty four, and the hitchikers guide to the galaxy please cheers muchly lil paul :)
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Homeworld, book one of Harry Harrison's To the Stars! trilogy is very 1984.

As for Hitchhikers.....many have attempted it. But so few come anywhere close to the quality that generally they're not worth bothering with. Have you tried Robert Rankin? Most amusing, and something of a follower of Mr Fort, it would seem.
 
I like the Fortean books that offer you a whole lot of wierd happenings, but don't come up with any explanations. It's no fun when it's not a mystery anymore!

Mike Dash's Borderlands is an excellent book.

I recently got the Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena and the Mammoth Book of UFOs, but I haven't got around to reading them yet. Too much to read, as usual...

I noticed on Amazon that Janet and Colin Bord's Modern Mysteries of Britain/the World are being republished, does anyone know if there is any new material in them? They make good bedtime reading.

As for fiction, one of my favourite Fortean novels is The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers - it would make a great film.
 
Anyone read the sequel (in a loose sense) to supernature? My dad had supernature in his expansive bookshelf and got me to read it, knowing me to be a weird little boy. I thought it was quite good but the "sequel" called "gifts of unknown things", if i remember, was rubbish and seemed to me to be the scribblings of a man with sunstroke.
 
i have read the rough guide to unexplained phenomenon its ok but can be a bit brief in places.
 
Barndad, you should try 'The secret Life of Inanimate Objects' for Mr W at his most obscure

8-)
 
Vurt by Jeff Noon is one of my all time favourites, along with Phillip K Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sleep? - so much different to Bladerunner... Hitch-hikers guide, too, of course. Of a strictly Fortean nature though, I find the Fortean Studies volumes pretty illuminating. I still have to read any Fort! Yes, I am ashamed... :(
 
JackSkellington said:
I still have to read any Fort! Yes, I am ashamed... :(
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Worry not, Jack, I'm sure you and I are not the only ones!

Carole
 
The Overman Culture

To Jonny B ...
Cool thanks I will look that up ... it's one of those things that's been niggling me for YEARS!

(later adds) Edmund Cooper by the looks of it, if this indeed the book I am on about.
 
Am I the only one who's failed to be impressed by the Tolkien books??

Carole
 
You remember how I mentioned M R James and 'Oh Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad'? Well the other week, I stayed in an ancient rambling hotel in Norwich. Twin beds. Only me there.

If you've read it, you'll know what I mean. Three AM. Odd noises. Left all me kit on the other bed.
Amazing how the sleeping brain can suddenly recall every damn word of a short story, isn't it?
 
ARRP ARRP THE CRAPMANILOW

WHAT ABOUT KURT VONNEGUT ? LOADS OF TIMESLIPS, ALIENS, COINCIDENCE , AND SOME FANTASTIC WRITING. SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE IS AN ANTIWAR BOOK THAT STARTS WITH THE WORDS "BILLY PILGRIM IS SPASTIC IN TIME." IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT DOWN FROM THAT POINT ON AS BILLY MOVES BACK AND FORTH THROUGH HIS LIFE, WITNESSING ATTROCITIES, ALIENS, AND THE DISAPPOINTMENT THAT LIFE BECOMES.

PURE GENIUS!

TRY PHILLIP K. DICK, TOO !
 
not really very fortean and naturally not that i'd ever say i had a single favourite book (i mean, which one of your kids do you prefer?) but i always like soldier of the mist by gene wolfe - only thing of his i've ever read and oddly affecting. ancient greece at its brightest and most brilliant through an amnesiac's diary: a vengeful goddess has taken his memory but given him second sight in return - or is he just hallucinating? simple but strangely wonderful. poss out of print now, or just very hard to find.
 
Charles De Lint has to be my favourite author. I tried to think of a specific book but I ca'nt everything I've ever read of his is good.
 
I was just about to mention Kurt V Junior, but someone has pipped me to the post. Breakfast of champions has been made into a film - Bruce Willis stars as the main character. It's worth a look. The Wasp Factory is a great read. Anything by Graham Masterton, I know it's pulp but I find myself unable to put them down. Whitley Strieber is also a good read (and before everyone complains I mean in a pulp fiction kind of way).

The complete opposite of Fortean but none the less a lighthearted extremely funny boo is High Fidelity - Nick Hornby.
 
Also how about the late great William S Burroughs. His books are fantasmagorical trips through apocalyptic landscape, his obsessive themes are control, drug use, and consciousness (amongst other things). He also wrote several of his books by cutting up whole pages of prose and randomly putting them back together. Often, he claimed, these passages predicted future events. Also interseted in dreams and electronic voice phenomenon.
 
Phenomena, a Book of Wonders by Michell & Rickard-
I read this soon after it came out, alone in a flat while my husband went to see Fleetwood Mac. (Fleetwood Mac! Fleetwood sodding Mac!) It scared the bejesus out of me & had many wondrous and satisfying pictures.

The 'spectral photo' of the flying woman, whose limbs trail off into ribbon shapes, was apparently created in my home town, which was very famous for spiritualism in the 19th century.
 
Time for a restart!

I don't know whether this is an uncool thing to do, but I'm going to try restarting this thread...

I've got loads of favourite books that have a fortean flavour, so here goes...

1) Philip K. Dicks last books, where the poor fella tries to repeatedly approach an answer to his own 'divine' experience. In 'The Divine Experience' 'God' contacts a man and a woman on a distant planet, creating a second messiah. The organised religion on earth goes to of it's way to bugger things up. 'Valis' is possibly the best book ever written about the subjective experience of paranormal phenomena and it's relation to mental illness. 'Radio Free Albemuth' approaches the same material from a different direction. These three are a treasure trove of interesting fortean ideas and obscure facts.

2) Most books by Ian McKewen, especially 'The Child In Time', 'Black Dogs' and 'Enduring Love'. 'Black Dogs' is about how a couples experience of a viscious black dog seperates them forever, as their understanding of their experience sends them off into two seperate understandings of the world, one rational without possibility of surprise, the other mystical without rigourous investigation.

3) Barry Giffords novels are littered with little fortean news stories, like the side bars in the news pages.
 
Well restarted Markbrown.

'In the country of last things' by Paul Auster, brilliant book, stayed with me for weeks.
Almost anything by Stephen Baxter is also good in an entirely different way.
Arthur C Clarkes 'Childhood's End'
Everything by Philip Dick and Kurt Vonnigut.

The appeal of Terry Pratchett has always eluded me (tho I like R Rankin). Surely I can't be the only one?
 
yeah, i bought all pratchett's stuff to start with but oh boy did they get worse... the fifth elephant was the last good one but even that was a blip. they gradually got more and more juvenile, sentimental, formulaic and badly written - that's what uncritical admiration can do to you.
r rankin had one extremely funny idea but repeats it continually - any one book of his is always a riot but you've read one, you've read them all.

mentioned gene wolfe above but since then have read some stuff by an obscure (well, in this country) french author called marcel ayme - try 'the wine of paris' or 'the man who could walk through walls', both short story collections full of strange and wonderful happenings. they'll cheer you up for weeks and you'll smile just thinking of them!
 
Yeah! Did Von Daniken's, Charles Berlitz, Donald Keyhoe, Lyall Watson etc etc. All riveting in their time but seem a bit silly now.

I'm a Tolkien lover too. LOTR and The Silmarillion being faves.

Favourites off the top of my head:

Anything by John Steinbeck,
Anything By Ernest K Gann,
Hitch Hickers Guide to the Galaxy especially So Long and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams,
The Golden Torc trilogy by Julian May,
The Stand by Stephen King,
Wild Swans by Jung Chang,

There's tons of other stuff but they're the one's that jump to the front of my mind.
 
My favorite author is Charles De Lint (urban fantasy) I would totally recomend his books to any of you guys...
His work is very based around Fortean things and it is all very well reshearched and documented in a way that makes the stories even more real.
Try Moonheart for a first read of his books.

Also has anyone else ever read the Shanara books, by Terry Brooks, quite Tolken'esk...I read them when I was in my early teens and still love to read them now.
 
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